They did tons of data analysis across all aspects of profiles, and had a popular blog where they published the results.
They were heavily involved in researching what factors more reliably led to not just better matches, but better relationships -- when you disabled your account, they'd ask if it was because you'd met someone through OkC and ask you to pick who, if you were willing to share.
I don't think there was anything fucked up about it, as long as it was all anonymized and at scale. Trying to understand what messaging strategies worked better or worse could be a major part of figuring out how to improve matches.
Like, one obvious factor could be to match people who send lots of long messages with lots of questions with each other, while a separate set matches people who's messaging style is one sentence at a time. I'm not saying that would necessarily work well, but it's not crazy to research if NLP analysis of messages can produce additional potential compatibility signals.
The whole point of OkC back then was to try to develop as many data-based signals as possible to improve matches.
You realize that you're responding in a thread about OkCupid deceiving users and sharing data with 3rd parties right?
34. In response to this request, Humor Rainbow gave the Data Recipient access to nearly three million OkCupid user photos. Humor Rainbow’s President and Chief Technology Officer were directly involved in facilitating the data transfer.
35. In addition to user photos, Humor Rainbow shared other personal data with the Data Recipient, including each user’s demographic and location information.
> I don't think there was anything fucked up about it, as long as it was all anonymized and at scale
I'm confused why "as long as" carries so much weight here considering the article that started this discussion. You seem to trust that they stopped their privacy fuckups with third parties. I don't know where your trust comes from.
I'm saying that NLP over messages, and sharing with third parties, are completely orthogonal. It's not about trust, it's two different topics. The different topic was started by the original commenter. Because people often make comments on HN that are related but separate. As NLP and third-party sharing are.
My privacy problem exists with third parties AND internally within OkCupid. At some point, running NLP over messages necessitates that an analyst or ops person actually has to look at the underlying data at some point.
The 3rd party stuff just exudes something like a privacy "code smell" -- "orthogonality" doesn't really matter to my point because 1. these things don't exist in a vacuum and 2. stench has a way of permeating through layers, regardless of how orthogonal underwear is.
Like, do you trust that OKCupid staff didn't download user messages to their laptops?
They were heavily involved in researching what factors more reliably led to not just better matches, but better relationships -- when you disabled your account, they'd ask if it was because you'd met someone through OkC and ask you to pick who, if you were willing to share.
I don't think there was anything fucked up about it, as long as it was all anonymized and at scale. Trying to understand what messaging strategies worked better or worse could be a major part of figuring out how to improve matches.
Like, one obvious factor could be to match people who send lots of long messages with lots of questions with each other, while a separate set matches people who's messaging style is one sentence at a time. I'm not saying that would necessarily work well, but it's not crazy to research if NLP analysis of messages can produce additional potential compatibility signals.
The whole point of OkC back then was to try to develop as many data-based signals as possible to improve matches.